Quote Only Thread

[Cordelia]

“...........flabbergastingly flattering.”

Kazuo Ishiguro on winning 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature.

"All children have to be deceived if they are to grow up without trauma."

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”

"The problem, as I see it, is that you've been told and not told. You've been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way."

from Never Let Me Go

[Cordelia]

"Conclusions come first, and rationalizations come later."

~ Daniel Kahneman ~

[Cordelia]

“Las Vegas is the savage heart of the American Dream.”

"Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted."

~ Hunter S. Thompson; Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ~

[chump]

http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders ... chs29.html
Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell
14 June 1807 Works 10:417--18

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this. Divide his paper into 4 chapters, heading the 1st, Truths. 2d, Probabilities. 3d, Possibilities. 4th, Lies. The first chapter would be very short, as it would contain little more than authentic papers, and information from such sources as the editor would be willing to risk his own reputation for their truth. The 2d would contain what, from a mature consideration of all circumstances, his judgment should conclude to be probably true. This, however, should rather contain too little than too much. The 3d & 4th should be professedly for those readers who would rather have lies for their money than the blank paper they would occupy.

[MacCruiskeen]

"Shit piss fuck cunt cocksucker motherfucker tits." (George Carlin)

[minime]

It is argued here that these apparent specializations relate to differences in the mode of attention. Animals and birds experience competing needs. This can be seen at one level in terms of the types of attention they are required to bring to bear on the world. There is a need to focus attention narrowly and with precision, as a bird, for example, needs to focus on a grain of corn in order to distinguish it from the pieces of grit on which it lies. At the same time there is a need for open attention, as wide as possible, to guard against a possible predator. Chicks achieve this by prioritizing local information with the right eye (left hemisphere), and global information with the left eye (right hemisphere). Chicks that are properly lateralized are more able to use these two types of attention effectively than are those in which, experimentally, lateralization has not been permitted to develop (by depriving them of light exposure on day 19 of incubation). For many species of birds and animals there are biases at the population level towards watching out for predators with the left eye.

-Iain McGilchrist

[Iamwhomiam]

^^^^ Chameleon Vision. Rain Man, Kim Peek could read two pages of text simultaneously, the one on the left with his left eye and the one on the right with his right eye.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201212/kim-peek-the-real-rain-man

[Grizzly]

If big money doesn't control the outcome of elections from the statehouses to the POTUS then why do the conglomerates spend it?

~ somebody somewhere

[seemslikeadream]

[chump]

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.

Kazuo Ishiguro

[Cordelia]

The Mexicans are a different cup of tea,..... They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they're dishonest. They do have some concept of family life, they don't live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.

But it's not just the ratty part of town, ........... The upper class in San Francisco is that way. The Bohemian Grove (an elite, secrecy-filled gathering outside San Francisco), which I attend from time to time. It is the most faggy goddamned thing you could ever imagine, with that San Francisco crowd. I can't shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.

Richard Nixon

[dada]

Don't measure success by performance in authoritarian organizations. From the point of view of real freedom, the marvels of capitalism or communism mean little. The source of real creativity is the unfettered individual mind, and its accomplishments permeate a culture subtly, without the help of marching masses, funded parties, overwhelming technology, professional endorsement, pr, marketing, or force. Such achievements take deeper root and have more value in the long run. - Bob Shea (paraphrased)

[chump]

You are embarking on a new adventure.

You will face insoluble problems.

For instance, if the object of your toil is futile, you’ll have no way of defending yourself, for the problems will be of mind boggling complexity.

Welcome to pure mathematics in the realm of solitude.

…

What does your intuition tell you?

You’re intuition is always right.

That’s why you have the makings of a true mathematician…

But for this you’re going to need some help.

https://youtu.be/0nycksytL1A -

[Jerky]

This, from La-Bas, struck me as particularly relevant for the times.

The rules of money are precise and invariable. Money attracts money, money seeks to accumulate in the same places, money is naturally attracted to scoundrels and those who are entirely bereft of any talent. When, by an exception which proves the rule, money finds its way into the hands of a man who, though wealthy, is neither a miser nor has any murderous proclivities, it stands idle, incapable of creating a force for good, incapable of even making its way into charitable hands who would know how to employ it. One might almost say that it takes revenge for its misdirection, that it undergoes a voluntary paralysis whenever it enters into the possession of someone who is neither a born swindler nor a complete and utter dotard.

When, by some extraordinary chance, it strays into the home of a poor man, money behaves even more inexplicably. It defiles immediately what was clean, transforms even the chastest pauper into a monster of unbridled lust and, acting simultaneously on the body and the soul, instils in its possessor a base egoism, not to mention an overweening pride, which insists that he spends every penny on himself alone; it makes even the humblest arrogant, and turns the generous person into a skinflint. In one second, it changes every habit, upsets ever idea, transforms the most deep-seated passions.
Money is the greatest nutrient imaginable for sins of the worst kind, which in a sense it aids and abets. If one of the custodians of wealth so forgets himself as to bestow a boon or make a donation, it immediately gives rise to hatred in the breast of its recipient; by replacing avarice with ingratitude, the equilibrium is established again: a new sin is commissioned by every good deed which is committed.

But the real height of monstrosity is attained when money, hiding the splendour of its name under the dark veil of the word, calls itself capital. At that moment its action is no longer limited to individual incitations to theft and murder, but extends across the entire human race. With a single word capital grants monopolies, erects banks, corners markets, changes people’s lives, is capable of causing millions to starve to death.

And all the while that it does this, money is feeding on itself, growing fat and breeding in a bank vault; and the Two Worlds worship it on bended knee, melting with desire before it, as before a God.

Excerpt from La-Bas, by J.-K. Huysmans
(translated into English as The Damned),
Chapter 1, pp. 12/13

[chump]

"If you don’t read the newspaper you’re uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you’re misinformed." - Mark Twain


"History doesn’t repeat but it surely rhymes." - Mark Twain